The mobile telephone industry has been associated with tremendous growth over the last several years. Today's mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc.) can be utilized as full-service computing mechanisms. For example, many of the most recent and advanced mobile devices can be associated with word processing software, web browsing software, electronic mail software, accounting software, and various other types of software. In general, applications heretofore available only by way of computing devices and/or Internet protocol (IP) based network devices are now available on such mobile devices. This expansion in capability of mobile devices has led to greater bandwidth requirements and an increase in interference among the frequencies available for mobile devices.
Typically, in a Frequency Duplex Division communication system, a frequency carrier pair provides the ability to transmit and receive data in both directions of a communication link. If interference on one path or the other, measured through a signal to noise ratio on this communication path, become too great, the frequency carrier pair is excluded from consideration for future resource allocation or only considered at the cost of severely degraded service, even if the other path is perfectly able to deliver the expected quality of service. As the number of mobile users increases, the consequences of excluding carriers from consideration for resource allocation begins to have a significant effect on the ability to meet the communication needs of the consuming public.
Accordingly, market pressure calls for methods to recapture some of the bandwidth lost because of interference along one direction of the communication path. One element associated with recapturing this bandwidth is the fact that the uplink or downlink paths usually operate in different frequency bands in a multicarrier configuration.